My first take at drawing with the iPad Pro and Apple Pencil

Aug 26, 2019
• William Killerud

Two weeks back I went full treat-yo’-self-mode and got a 12.9 inch iPad Pro,
the keyboard cover to go with it, and an Apple Pencil. I’m not particularly
creative – at least in the drawy-painty sense. I work in tech, but I don’t formally do
design work. I don’t sketch wireframes or draw user journeys or personas. To me the Pencil
(both with lower- and upper case “P”) is more for fun than for work.

Still, now that I have the thing I can put it to some good use in my
CSS labs. In the labs I do things. Things that sometimes include image
assets. Before, I would look around the web for a suitable image which hopefully
was OK to use in an educational setting. But now, with some patience and
trial-and-error, I can make my own!

Say hello to Stjernen, my pointy CSS shapes teaching assistant!

Pow! Stjernen is pointy, which is very handy when we demo CSS shapes together.

I drew Stjernen in Pixelmator. I won’t go
into detail on how to start drawing in Pixelmator, but for reference I used the Manga
brush to make Stjernen. The brush is listed in the Markers category.

…

…

OK, fine. Stjernen wasn’t my first take at drawing…

My first drawing in Pixelmator.

There. Happy?

If you’re in the market for an iPad that supports the Apple Pencil
I recommend picking one up. In the weeks I’ve had one I’ve used it for some
kindergarden-level drawing, some precision edits of photos, and annotation of a
PDF during review. If for nothing else, get one just for fun 👨‍🎨